Art Dudley Listening

Dear Reader,

Not long ago, I lost patience with coffee.

Before that, I'd never quite made it to coffee-nerd status, but I had all four wheels on the onramp. A few years ago I got rid of my cheap coffeemaker and switched to a French press, because it was more hands-on. I started buying whole beans instead of ground coffee, and grinding them in the store's grinder, on its coarsest setting. When that wouldn't do, I bought an inexpensive electric coffee grinder. When that wouldn't do, I bought a manual grinder. There was only one brand of bean I liked, and I had to drive 45 minutes to get to the store that sold it. I bought a scale for weighing the beans before I ground them (because measuring spoons are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to measuring ground coffee), and a long confectioner's thermometer for checking the temperature of my hot water (because boiling water is too hot, and "burns" the coffee), and I bought a large Pyrex measuring cup for precisely measuring the hot water because, apparently, none of the world's small-appliance makers can get their shit together and make a French press with water-level markings on the glass.

So every day, as the dog did her early-morning incessant-barking thing, I weighed and ground beans and measured and heated water and went through all this bullshit for one cup of coffee. Maybe two. Coffee that had a lot of sediment in the bottom of the cup, and tasted good only every second or third day.

Then my family and I went on vacation. I left all my coffee paraphernalia at home because I was mad at it, and when we got to our vacation rental I noticed on the kitchen counter a cheap Black & Decker coffeemaker pretty much like the one I used to own, and a bag of ground coffee. On our first morning in the house I made coffee, not expecting much. It was amazing, and there was no sediment in the cup. When we returned home, I threw out my French press in less time than it takes Donald Trump to recycle his inner cabinet, and bought an electric coffeemaker.

The constant drip, drip, drip
Needless to say, there wasn't a hi-fi system in our rental house, nor was there a collection of records. And while it might have been fun, or at least poetically satisfying, for me to say that, during that vacation, I also lost patience with perfectionist audio, nothing could be further from the truth. Although our five days away from home were pleasant and relatively carefree, I found myself hankering to listen to one or two recordings of Elgar's music in particular—not via an iPhone and earbuds or some kitchen-counter Bose Wave CD player, but through my colorful-sounding Shindo amp and a pair of speakers no younger than 50.

So no—this isn't one of my head-shaking, hand-wringing, being-an-audiophile-is-horrible-so-stop-buying-expensive-products columns. This is one of my head-shaking, hand-wringing, being-an-audiophile-is-wonderful-but-only-after-you've-learned-to-trust-your-own-senses-when-deciding-whether-to-buy-expensive-products columns.

There are people who, at every point in their lives, exhibit good judgment as consumers. I'm sure as hell not one of them—and today, as I pause and look back, I see that some of my poorer buying decisions have been made at times when I was cursed with a combination of too little sense of self and too much disposable income. This is actually good news: Instead of meaning that I have very bad judgment, it means that I might have very good judgment, but am simply too stupid to consistently act on it.

Let's use clothing and hairstyles as examples, and let's substitute taste for judgment. When I look through old photographs of myself, it seems that in perhaps 75% of them I look presentable; in the remaining 25% I look like a jackass. The latter are best exemplified by one unfortunate photo that shows a twentysomething me in a buckskin jacket, bell-bottom jeans, a long pageboy haircut, and aviator-frame glasses so large that my surroundings were brought into focus for the benefit of not only my eyes but my cheekbones. Setting aside even the chronological inconsistencies—the lives of Buffalo Bill Cody and Prince Valiant were separated by a gulf of some 1400 years—this was not a good look for me, and may have gone a long way toward explaining my lack of success with women.

How did this happen? I was working full time, and my living expenses were few because I shared a house with four other people—who would have been within their rights to give me a savage beating for dressing like a medieval bison hunter—thus making it all too easy to make frivolous purchases.

Why did this happen? Because, in a moment of weakness (if two or three years can be considered a moment), I forgot who I was and decided I wanted to be someone else. It was, I suppose, the same sort of perfect storm of receding self-esteem that leads some contemporary youngsters to manbuns, ear gauges, and having themselves tattooed with the likenesses of very bad musicians. Luckily, all of my regrettable fashion moves were reversible—although, in my dark hours of the soul, I believe that God has punished me for doing foolish things with my hair by taking some of it away from me.

Transpose the above to the world of domestic audio and you have my music system of 1985, which looked and sounded grotesque in comparison to the system that preceded it. I'll call those systems Goofus and Gallant, respectively.

Highlights of the Gallant system were a Rega Planar 3 turntable, NAD 1020 preamp, and a pair of Snell Type J/II loudspeakers. None of those products was very expensive, yet I loved the way that system sounded—and during the years I owned it, I bought a lot of great records. This was the time in my life when I got into Philip Glass and Marshall Crenshaw, and reconnected with my early Beatles records.